A Weekend in Rügen Island

What a beautiful island it is Rügen! The largest island of Germany, located off the coast in the Baltic Sea and 300 km away from Hamburg. Statistics say most of the German people still spend their vacation in Germany and Rügen Island is clearly one of their favourite destinations.

Friends of mine rented an apartment in Sellin, one of the seaside resorts of Rügen Island, and had a spare room. They invited me to stay with them over the weekend. My answer was yes, obviously…

Rügen is a big island with a total area of 974 km² with lots of attractions. From all the things one can do in the island, I picked a couple for the weekend. Here are my highlights for you, in case you find your way to Rügen.

Sellin Pier

My tour started in Sellin which is a very beautiful town indeed. The 394 meters long pier is the most famous landmark of Sellin, which is also famous with its beautiful resort villas with Art Nouveau architecture.

Sellin is located directly at a long wide sandy beach and there are many cafés and restaurants which make this town perfect as base for the stay in Rügen.

Photo by Ingmar Sörgens – check out his Flickr profile for more

Prora

On our way to the white chalk cliff in Jasmund National Park we first drive by Prora which is one of those ugly faces of the history. It was build (not fully completed) by Nazi Germany as a resort planned by the “Strength through Joy” organisation.

Since 2004 the local government started to sell the ugly cement blocks to investors and today there are already hotels and apartments for tourists. Driving around here was really not a joy at all and I would never ever understand the people who would want to stay in such a horrible ugly place with even more horrible and ugly history.

I didn’t take photos of Prora. Here is a photo of the beautiful magical forest instead.

White Chalk Cliffs

I quickly forgot about my bad mode as soon as we arrived in Jasmund National Park. We parked the car in Hagen and walked 3 km till Königsstuhl (King’s Chair) through a beautiful forest.

Königsstuhl lies at 118 m above sea level and from here you have breathtaking views of the Baltic Sea. The white chalk cliffs of Königsstuhl can be best seen from Victoria View. The legend says the person who first climbed the cliff became the king.

Admission fee: 8,50€
From/to Königsstuhl you can also take the bus from/to Hagen or Sassnitz.

We ended our tour for that day in Sassnitz which is famous for its port, not away from the Jasmund National Park.

Rasender Roland

Jep, this is the first train I heard of with a nickname: Rushing Roland. With its 100 year old locomotives it is also the cutest train I drove with. The steam-powered narrow gauge railway is definitely a highlight and perfect medium to get to some of the main destinations in Rügen.

We drove with the Rushing Roland with a speed of 30 km per hour (not sure why they call it “rushing”) through breathtaking landscapes till Lauterbach which has a beautiful harbour and “swimming” houses.

Yellow Fields

Who followed me in Instagram during my stay in Rügen already know how flashed I was with the bright colours of these fields. The green of the trees, the blue of the sky, the white of the clouds and the yellow of the rape plants (canola) just took me away in a happy world for a while.

The views of these endless fields were so beautiful that I couldn’t stop taking pictures of them.